Indian Activist`s Case Haunts Courts Anew

November 10, 1992|By Rogers Worthington, Chicago Tribune.

ST. PAUL — In a murder case that has reverberated around the world like a restless spirit for 15 years, defense lawyers once again went before a federal appeals court Monday and argued that Leonard Peltier should get a new trial.

``It`s like a steam engine that just keeps going,`` lawyer Bruce Ellison said of the effort to convince the courts that Peltier was wrongly convicted in 1977 of murdering two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux reservation in South Dakota.

But the engine never seems to arrive. Peltier, 48, an American Indian Movement activist of Ojibway, Sioux and French ancestry, has languished in federal prisons ever since, despite a galaxy of star defense lawyers, a listing in Amnesty International`s annual report on abuse of indigenous peoples, and demonstrations of support that have spanned oceans and continents.

``He`s had the best lawyers. There is no evidence that is going to release him, and he knows it,`` said Nicholas O`Hara, agent in charge of the FBI`s upper Midwest office in Minneapolis.

But that does not deter Peltier`s supporters. Over the years the case has become a crusade that has been joined by an odd but powerful coalition that ranges from Hollywood to college campuses to Washington and points beyond.

It also has become an open wound for the FBI. The bureau`s methods have been held to scrutiny, and it believes the depiction of Peltier as a symbol for all the injustices ever dealt to American Indians obscures the wanton murders of its two men.

If past decisions hold, Monday`s proceedings are not likely to yield a call for a new trial by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court ruled in 1986 that Peltier received a fair trial, and no substantial new evidence or argument was presented Monday. But if ever there was a good time for Peltier`s case outside the courtroom, 1992-93 could be it.

Last spring saw the release of ``Incident at Oglala,`` a documentary produced by Robert Redford, and ``Thunderheart,`` a feature film directed by Michael Apted. Both put forth viewpoints sympathetic to the defense notion that Peltier was railroaded. Two TV documentaries dealt with the case last year, and film maker Oliver Stone is said by his agent to have a Peltier project in development.

More impressive, two U.S. senators-Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, and Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.)-say that after Bill Clinton becomes president in January they will ask him to review the case and consider commutation of Peltier`s two life sentences.

Priming much of this was the 1991 release of Peter Matthiessen`s sympathetic book, ``In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,`` which was delayed nearly a decade by a libel suit.

In the book`s new epilogue, Matthiessen tells of interviewing a masked man he calls X who says that he, not Peltier, killed the two wounded agents. X has not chosen to make his confession official.

The FBI believes justice was well served at Peltier`s five-week trial in 1977. The jury found him guilty of killing agents Ronald Williams and Jack Coler at Pine Ridge on June 26, 1975. The two were shot at point blank range after they were wounded in a hopelessly one-sided firefight with as many as 47 AIM activists and supporters.

The two agents had entered the ranch of Harry Jumping Bull with a felony arrest warrant for a young Sioux named Jimmy Eagle. They were following a van the FBI later said was occupied by Peltier. The van stopped, and its occupants emerged and began firing on the agents, according to prosecutors.

They argued that Peltier, who was wanted on a federal warrant for attempted murder of an off-duty police officer in Milwaukee, assumed the approaching agents were after him and began firing.

The agents` two cars were riddled with 125 bullets, while the agents fired no more than five shots, according to prosecutors. Peltier was placed at the scene by two witnesses, and a shell casing found there was linked to what prosecutors said was his AR-15 rifle.

Peltier`s lawyers, led by former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark, put forth a complex argument that holds that because prosecutors conceded after Peltier`s conviction that they could not actually prove he was the man who fired the fatal shots, they were saying in essence that he was guilty instead of aiding and abetting the murders.

Some of those who support Peltier`s cause argue that, regardless of what he did, he did it in the heated environment of a virtual civil war on the Pine Ridge reservation. And they argue that the FBI played favorites. AIM, they say, clearly was not the agency`s favorite after its 1973 treaty rights stand- off at Wounded Knee.

Clark, William Kunstler and other defense lawyers say they will take the case to the Supreme Court if necessary. And Lynn Crooks, the assistant U.S. attorney in Fargo, N.D., who first prosecuted the case in 1977 and stayed with it through the appellate process, probably will be there too.

``They aren`t going to give up with this thing. It`s a cause,`` Crooks said. ``It has nothing to do with Leonard. It`s a cause.``